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journal contribution
posted on 2024-06-18, 10:34authored byMJ Sharpe
The debates surrounding Heidegger’s National Socialism and its relations to his thought have long been known in the Anglophone world under the juridical heading of “the Heidegger case”. Yet for a long time, it was only possible for students and scholars to access parts of the evidence. Leading figures in the case for the prosecution, contending that Heidegger’s Nazism was real and inescapably important for an adequate assessment of Heidegger’s work, have had a difficult business having their briefs heard – certainly within the discipline of philosophy. Yet the 2014 appearance in Germany of the Schwarze Hefte (Black Notebooks) has sparked fiery exchanges, from the time when the explicitly
anti-semitic parts of their contents became public knowledge. These notebooks seemed to spectacularly confirm what Heidegger’s most vocal German- and French-language critics had long been saying on the basis of the letters, lectures and seminars that had appeared (without comparable publicity) since around the turn of the millennium. this dedicated subedition publishes fr the first time in English articles by leading critical scholars on Heidegger and Nazism working in the French and German-languages.